On Monday, Americans were forced to relive the horrors of another school shooting, this one in Nashville. The cycle of “thoughts and prayers” is laughably insufficient. So, too, is the rhetoric on safe schools and protecting our children. Because the truth is that lawmakers, especially GOP lawmakers, are only concerned about certain crime. They have gerrymandered the boundaries of that concern, excluding aspects that would illuminate our bloody reality.
They have gerrymandered the boundaries of that concern, excluding aspects that would illuminate our bloody reality.
Just 6 months ago, high-profile midterm election races pushed the conversation about America’s crime problem into the national spotlight stage. GOP challengers were parroting talking points around a sensationalized narrative that painted Democrats as anti-police and ultimately responsible for rising crime rates. This, despite the fact that many of the areas where violent crime is highest across the United States are in red states and, more specifically, GOP-led districts. But there was another missing piece in the conversation: mass shootings.
There is, of course, a reason for this: The cure involves a medicine that’s hard to swallow. Where our minds are conditioned to focus on urban violence in a way that purposefully leads us down a path of law enforcement expansion, such an approach does not inherently thwart the bullets too often brutalizing America’s babies.
There are effectively three main components to school shootings: the guns that are used, the people who use them (and those who are subsequently victimized), and the schools where the shootings occur. Republicans are very protective of their guns — more than they are of the children and educators forced to leave in fear of these weapons. We have considered ideas like bulletproof shelters in classrooms and arming teachers; these are on top of sad but necessary steps like active shooter drills. Even as there will always be an…
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